[vtkusers] Building vtk on HP-PARISC HPUX-11.11 64bit fails

[Burkhard Neinhues]

Hi,

building VTK on HPUX PARISC machines  has never worked so far without 
adjusting  Makefiles manually.
However, now with version 5.0, the PARISC linker often fails to locate 
dependent libraries.
This is NOT a problem with
1) libraries not being present
2) proper -L options not set
3) internal library names

I noticed that VTK uses a lot of shared libraries and neglects that 
dependent libraries are automatically
loaded by the dynamic linker if specified. Instead, during the VTK build 
each new shared library is linked with all the shared libraries
compiled before even if this results in "double" linking the same 
libraries over and over again.
This results also in multiply linking X11 libraries in, sometimes in the 
wrong order (and yes, the order is
significant on HP PARISC).
Example: Linking in with -lX11 -Xext may lead to unresolved symbol error 
messages when loading in Python
vtk libraries. They can be fixed by reversing the order: -lXext -lX11

There're less problems on Linux and also on HP Itanium 64 bit, but the 
Parisc linker is not
able to resolve so many dependencies of mulitply linked-in shared 
libraries. This situation can be resolved
by manually linking  shared libraries on the command line using copy and 
paste.
This is cleary not the most convenient way to do this.
Is there a better way?

Cmake is also difficult to compile on HPs (missing symbols for curses) 
and must be manually tuned to allow
64 bit builds on HPs.

Burkhard Neinhues


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